Steve Jobs: Here's another feather in his iHat

Once sacked by the company he founded, Fortune magazine's CEO of the decade took five months off to recover from a transplant operation. With the expected launch of iSlate, will he be leaving competitors trailing again?

He has been likened to Josiah Wedgewood, Henry Ford and Estée Lauder for what Fortune magazine calls his "intense drive, unflagging curiosity and keen commercial imagination": the words of Nancy Koehn, a Harvard Business School historian. But Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple and Fortune's chief executive of the decade, has done better than any of these.

People may insist that a Ford is preferable to a Chevrolet, or Lauder's lipstick to Chanel's, but they are unlikely to launch into such passionate advocacy of their product as a MacBook or iPhone user.

Jobs has not only second-guessed and devised for the world products it deems necessary to communicate and to entertain itself, but has done so in the language of a higher cause. When he launched the iPhone in 2007, Jobs described it not as "useful", but "revolutionary and magical". His computers, Jobs told Rolling Stone 15 years ago, will make the world "clearly a better place".

Very soon, speculation suggests that there will be further democratisation, with a promised next phase in this digitally eschatological view of history: the Apple tablet computer or iSlate. The last month of the Steve Jobs noughties saw cyberspace believers make several orbits of excitement as Apple registered an internet domain called iSlate.com. Jobs is known for launching new gadgets in January, and this one is expected to be an iPhone, iPod, TV, news-stand and more rolled into one.

Another "new era" is being hailed with an intake of breath, already, and the timing could not be more apposite: to cap a tumultuous career within his own company, Jobs had taken five months' leave from Apple after a liver transplant in January 2009, fuelling perennial rumours about his health. But he is back and how.

Steve Jobs's life has been charted in obsessive, unauthorised books, one of which, iCon, made him so angry he banned its publisher Wylie and Sons' entire list from Apple stores. Yet Jobs is, as is universally reported, a secretive man, leaving one to pick carefully through the curriculum vitae.

He was born in 1955, in San Francisco, to Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian student and later political scientist, and Joanne Carole Schieble – but was adopted and raised by Paul and Clara Jobs in the town of Mountain View, California. At high school, he attended evening lectures by Hewlett-Packard, took a summer job at the company and met Steve Wozniak, with whom he would found Apple.

Although just too young for the Summer of Love, Jobs was within its orbit, dropping out of college to work for Atari video games, "dressed in rags, basically," recalls Al Alcorn, Jobs's boss. "I don't know why I hired him. There was some spark, some inner energy." But Jobs took employment only to save for the "hippie trail" to India, a spiritual journey undertaken with the man who would become Apple's first employee, Dan Kottke. In iCon, Kottke recalls: "Steve's devotion to the philosophies of the east seemed to be tied to his quest for other truths – the absolutes and the loopholes in science and electronics."

When he returned to California in 1975, head shaven and wearing robes, Jobs was on a psychedelic adventure. According to the historian of the computer industry's psychedelic origins, John Markoff, Jobs is said to have called taking LSD "one of the two or three most important things" he had ever done.

The following year, Jobs and Wozniak, a hacker, were ready to design the first commercially successful small computer, the Macintosh, and founded Apple. For a decade, Jobs led Apple in forging its place – which burgeoning commercial success has not eroded – as the hip, cool, thinking person's alternative to the PC juggernaut; before he became Goliath, Jobs played David.

One of those working on the Mac was Bud Tribble, who spotted early how Jobs "has the ability to make people around him believe in his perception of reality. It's a combination of very fast comeback, catchphrases and the occasional very original insight, which he throws in to keep you off balance".

In 1985, Jobs and Wozniak received the first National Medal for Technology from President Ronald Reagan. But there was disharmony in Apple-land: that same year, after an internal power struggle, the man Jobs had lured from Pepsi to run the company, John Sculley, relieved Jobs of his post.

Jobs's decade in exile only consolidated his position within Apple by demonstrating that it could not survive without him. The technology pioneered by the NeXT company he formed would lay a second set of foundations for Apple, as would the premium Jobs put on design at NeXT. Jobs also bought the Graphics Group, renaming it Pixar and working with Disney on films that would reach billions: Toy Story and Toy Story 2, A Bug's Life, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo and Ratatouille.

When Jobs married Laurene Powell in 1991, the union was blessed by a Zen Buddhist monk. They now have three children and Jobs has another born in 1978 to a San Francisco painter (a child he for a while refused to acknowledge as his). According to one unauthorised biography, Joan Baez is among his former lovers. And yet, unlike Bill Gates, whom Apple believers regard as the capitalist monster, Jobs has shown no interest in philanthropy or worthy causes.

Jobs-less, Apple had gone into decline. In 1996, it bought NeXT and before long appointed Jobs as interim CEO, or "iCeo", as he would joke. It was at this point that Jobs began to define the "digital lifestyle" beyond his elite club of Macintosh users, convincing the wider world to "think different", as his slogan urged, with iTunes, iPods, iPhones, MacBook Air and the rest. In 2000, Apple was worth $5bn; it is now worth $170bn.

Because Apple is such a personally propelled venture, it is a brutal fact that news about Jobs's health problems is for many news about Apple's stock price, hence whispers of concern when he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, and again during last year's transplant.

Jobs might still be a Buddhist and greatly admire Gandhi, but that does not make iPhone technology any less attractive to the Raytheon defence contractor, which last year unveiled One Force Tracker, the first of a series of software applications turning iPhone and iPod touch devices into battlefield tools.

On the other hand, Marcus Gilroy-Ware, who teaches online journalism at City University, London – dependent on Steve Jobs's computers – and also a fine bass guitarist, puts it this way: "If you are a guitarist, you want to play the best instrument you can find. It's the same with a computer – you need the best tools. Apple's history, going back to its psychedelic origins, has mostly been about producing these creative tools. The first two applications on the Mac were a writing program and a drawing program, not spreadsheets."

As a Mac owner, I am, according to Jobs, part of a "peaceful revolution", and owner of something of "beauty", the word universally used to describe and distinguish Steve Jobs's products, and arguably the reason they have become the computers of choice for the mid- to upper-creative classes.

What to say about the beauty of an iPod or Mac? Unlike a Grecian urn, no great poet has written an ode to one. But there have been equivalents of an ode in our time. Apple products were ubiquitous features of recent television series by Simon Schama and Stephen Fry as they charged around America. One should presume that these were not sleazy product placements, but that both presenters genuinely believe the visual effect (and their own veracity) would be enhanced by an on-screen accessory which pre-Apple directors would have ordered out of the way.

But a Mac cannot by definition meet Keats's stipulation, regarding the Grecian urn, that "a thing of beauty is joy forever" – for it is Jobs's task to make his own ideas redundant.

In its citation, Fortune magazine describes the establishment of Apple stores as going "deeper than retail". The Apple store in London's Regent Street on new year's day had light shows, film workshops and red-shirted sales clergy proselytising the latest iGospel. The MacNN website claimed that "Apple's presence in Regent Street has also been credited with helping to vitalise the area and attract other retailers".

The UK has yet to see a proliferation of Apple vending machines at airports, as in the US, where one can buy a spare hard drive as you can a packet of crisps. But the MacNN site goes on to say that this branch in Regent Street generates three times the revenue per square foot as Harrods – the corner store of the super-rich now easily overtaken by the man we will shortly see, no doubt wearing the usual black polo-neck and sneakers, pulling his next revolutionary magic rabbit out of the iHat.

• This article was changed on 6 January 2010 because we said Jobs's description of taking LSD as "one of the two or three most important things" he had ever done was from the official biography of Steve Jobs on Apple's website. This was incorrect. The quotation was taken from "What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry" by John Markoff. This has been corrected.

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